Decision to move stand pays off on first hunt in new location
Missing a nice doe from 75 yards last week turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Shane Migues.
The 22-year-old offshore safety technician from Lafayette was hunting with some friends on 1,500 acres in Converse in Sabine Parish when a doe appeared shortly after he got on his stand around 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 30.
“A nice sized doe came out of the woods and I watched her for about five minutes,” Migues said. “She went back in the brush and then came back out, so I said, ‘Well, I’m going to take a shot at it,’ and I missed. I thought I wasn’t going to see anything else.”
After his shot rang out, he actually answered a phone call from one of his friends nearby who was checking to see what had happened.
“As soon as I hung up with him, I played on my phone for a couple of minutes, and then looked up and he was there,” Migues said.
“He” was a 215-pound nine-point that had apparently been chasing the doe Migues missed minutes earlier.
“I was surprised. I didn’t think I’d see anything after that loud shot,” he said. “I guess he was hot on that doe’s tail. If I would have killed her, I definitely think I wouldn’t have ever seen him.”
The big buck started walking towards him, and his second shot of the morning found its mark.
“I was pretty nervous the whole time. I was kind of shaking with the gun in my hand,” he said. “I hit him in the neck and the bullet came out his left shoulder. He stood up on his two back legs and dropped right there. It was an instant kill shot.”
The big buck was taken on the very first hunt after that particular stand had been relocated, Migues said.
“We moved that stand from another location the day before,” he said. “Nobody had ever hunted it, but we were seeing lots of tracks there.”
After the shot, Migues said he contacted the landowner to tell him about the big buck, which had about a 13-inch inside spread and rough-scored 103 ½ inches.
“He said, ‘Come on man, stop joking with me,’” Migues said. “I even took a picture with it and sent it to him, and he said, ‘You must have Photoshop on your phone.’”
Don’t forget to enter photos of your bucks in the Nikon Big Buck Photo Contest to be eligible for monthly giveaways and the random drawing for Nikon Monarch binoculars at the end of the contest.
Read other stories about big bucks killed this season by clicking here.
